The Rental Market Is Thawing, One City at a Time

well.So you mentioned roles and relationships with these key PR firms out there, and especially the companies that are spending a lot of time talking about real estate.

And I, I know it doesn't blow your mind, but it blows my mind when I roll up Apple News in the morning and I see us featured on the biggest real estate podcast or The Wall Street Journal or The New York Times, and I know there's work happening behind the scenes that I don't see here.

So what do econ teams do to build relationships and rapport with these different companies to make sure when there's a moment that we have an at bat to be able to be part of the headline?

Yeah.

I, I think we're happily in a position now where it, it isn't shocking when we get those media mentions.

I think having been doing this for 10 years, that wasn't always the case.

And so there, there's been a, a long runway of, I think, setting the foundation to get to the place where we are today.

And a lot of it is really just nuts and bolts PR work of, of building those relationships.

I think in the early days, it was a lot of just sending out cold emails to, to folks, uh, who are writing about these trends and, and covering real estate and, and a lot of it is really having to prove ourselves, especially in those early days when maybe the Apartment List brand wasn't as well known.

We have to give those reporters, especially the ones that are working at the highest levels when you're talking about some place like The Wall Street Journal or The New York Times, the bar is really high for the quality of data that they're going to report on.

So we'd really have to do a lot to just build that trust, to let them know that this is a data source that has a lot of real expertise and thought behind it, because there are, frankly, there are folks in the space that are maybe putting out data that is-- doesn't have the same level of quality control behind it.

And so I think folks that are, are covering this stuff really wanna know that there's good methodology behind your data.

Uh, and so a lot of it has really just been a big runway of building those relationships, getting to know folks, you know, grabbing coffee with folks, understanding what they're interested in, which also inputs into the stuff that we're researching.

I would say in the early days too, we also got a lot of leverage out of just doing novel research on data that maybe didn't even come from Apartment List.

There's a lot of great public data sources out there from Census, uh, and other kind of government data sources that we would do analysis where we would just put a novel spin on data that was already out there, which helped us, again, build off of a data set that was already trusted when maybe ours hadn't been cemented in that way yet.

And also at a time when our marketplace was smaller and maybe we didn't have quite as much data to be talking about at that point.

I think in the early days, a lot of it was getting creative, doing the grunt work to build those relationships.

And then over time, as people get to know you and that data set does become a trusted source, I think it, it's snowballed from there.

That's cool.

A-as we think about the data compounding and the fact that we're not just consuming other data sets, but we're now using ours, I mean, our, our marketplace is comfortably one of the biggest that we see in the industry today.

You know, one of the things that I look forward to, and I know that the industry looks forward to each and every month, is this National Rent Report.

It is a monthly writeup, and I can't even call it a report these days.

I mean, it's like a media company inside of our website, it feels like.

It really does comprehensively talk about what's happening in the industry.

And I love the fact that it starts national, but our data sets actually allow consumers completely for free to drill into individual markets and see anything from rent to demand to even amenitization, which I find super impactful.